Chapter 3. Dinomania
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Troubles in Paradise-Downard 194 Chapter 3. Dinomania Creationist “Geology” and Richard Milton – p. 207 Biogeography, Continent Drift and the Flood – p. 225 ID hiding the YEC ball: Robert Gentry and Kent Hovind – p. 244 Dinosaurs were the most successful of land vertebrates, dominating life on earth for 130 million years. That’s roughly one quarter of all the time since the Cambrian Explosion. Yet for all their sustained success the non-flying ones nonetheless went extinct, along with the pterosaurs and marine reptiles, which means not only that few things in nature last forever, but also that there once existed a world wonderfully unlike the one we know now. Accepting that dinosaurs flourished in their own milieu therefore plops a discontinuity into the picture of life as static tableau fixed since Creation. If things were once so different, how and why did the present condition come about, and how did the dinosaur world relate to what had come before? Curious youngsters ransacking their local library for answers to those questions would inevitably bump flat into the evolutionary big picture underlying modern paleontology, a situation not at all congenial to the Biblical pageant Scientific Creationism has in store for them. But venture outside the Creation Science studio and dinosaurs don’t intrude much on the thinking of antievolutionists. Michael Denton or Phillip Johnson didn’t touch on them, and they warranted only a passing nod in Davis and Kenyon’s Of Pandas and People. This general omission may be due again to the reactive character of creationism. None of the major works lambasting traditional creationism were penned by dinosaur paleontologists, and so the particular lessons to be gleaned from studying the Mesozoic world were inadequately explored by them. Unless creationists had a really good reason not to ignore the dinosaurs, they had no reminder to tackle them in their own rejoinders. Such is the daisy chain of scholarship when motivated by apologetics instead of curiosity. Only Flood Geology has an overriding need not to skip them. Examples of every “kind” of land animal alive before the Deluge had to have been preserved aboard Noah’s Ark; there was simply no escaping that theological imperative. And while few children were going to be aware of Moschops or Probainognathus (especially if creationists didn’t incautiously blurt out their names), the legions of youngsters slavering over Velociraptor and company made the dinosaurs far too familiar to overlook. With volumes of detailed scientific interpretation lining the public library shelves as potentially the last word, something had to be done to steer young minds back to the Biblical straight-and-narrow. Especially so after the deluge of another sort: the dinosaur mania following Steven Spielberg’s extremely popular film version of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park.1 The interesting methodological challenge for creationists concerns this lack of dinosaur- specific critiques of creationism. Without knowing beforehand what was supposed to be critical information, how could they tell what to parry and when to thrust? To rescue their imperiled youth from the insidious clutches of evolutionary thinking meant researching the topic from scratch. An involved enterprise, to be sure, reducing the field of willing defenders to a complement of one: the tireless Duane Gish. The dozen pages Gish devoted to arguing his case against dinosaur intermediates in Evolution: The Fossils STILL Say NO! certainly reinforced his reputation for superficial scholarship and dated analysis. It also exposed the soft underbelly of Creation Science methodology. Creationism in general is resolute about not discerning the pattern in the chronology and distribution of living things, but Scientific Creationism as a subgroup goes beyond to insist that the underlying chronology doesn’t exist either. Given what a large chunk of life is represented by the dinosaurs, it would seem both essential and desirable for Creation Science advocates to press their case with utmost vigor. But if dinosaurs and people really weren’t contemporary and didn’t die out in a single Flood event, Creation Scientists are going to have a tough time arranging the pieces to make that seem reasonably true. Their only recourse will be misdirection. They’ll have to focus on the inevitably missing evolutionary data, without giving the audience a clue as to what’s going on—that some Troubles in Paradise-Downard 195 geological periods are better represented than others because erosion can erase former deposits. The luck of the fossil draw is unlikely to capture more than a sampling of the success stories, let alone a representative series of all the microevolutionary wiggles that occurred along the way. But should a few evolutionary intermediates have the ill fortune to turn up in the right time and place anyway, the creationist can simply not mention them. The lack of a functional creationist “map of time” turns critical as Gish began his version of the dinosaur adventure story. His first target concerned what the early archosaurs were up to. Gish’s sharpened spear consisted of a single quotation drawn from the 1966 edition of Alfred Romer’s Vertebrate Paleontology: That this supposed ancestry is highly contrived seems to be immediately apparent by a reading of evolutionary literature. Speaking of Saltoposuchus, a pseudosuchian thecodont (see figure 4), Romer says: It is obvious that it was forms of this sort from which arose the pterosaurs, birds, and dinosaurs. There are no known thecodonts which show positive indications leading toward the first two groups mentioned, nor toward one of the two dinosaurian orders, the Ornithischia. How can it be obvious that something like Saltoposuchus was ancestral to flying reptiles, birds, and ornithischian dinosaurs if these creatures reveal no “positive indications leading toward” flying reptiles, birds, and ornithischian dinosaurs? It seems apparent that Romer has simply adopted the thecodont reptiles as ancestors for birds, flying reptiles, bird-hipped dinosaurs, and crocodiles (mentioned by Romer elsewhere) for lack of a better candidate, because the fossil record fails to produce any actual ancestors and the necessary transitional forms.2 This was an ingenuous passage on several levels. The most obvious one concerned why paleontologists connected pterosaurs, birds and dinosaurs to thecodonts in the first place. We already know it was their basic diapsid anatomy, which Gish naturally did not discuss. If you wanted to define what a generalized ancestor for those three specialized groups might look like, the thecodonts certainly fit the bill. But the repetitive Three Card Monte Gish played with “flying reptiles, birds, and ornithischians” actually flagged the very item we weren’t supposed to notice. If the thecodonts then known to science didn’t rigorously bridge that particular trio, as Romer properly noted, what about the other “of the two dinosaurian orders,” the Saurischia? And on that front, had anything at all happened paleontologically in the three decades since? The first true dinosaurs are known from only a handful of Late Triassic sites, most notably the Ischigualasto Formation of Argentina.3 Over the last thirty years that region has become a magnet for fossil collectors interested in uncovering the evolutionary history of the major dinosaur groups (though it is a trifle hot, dusty, and remote for practitioners of armchair creationist paleontology). The earliest and most primitive of the saurischians (Eoraptor) and ornithischians (Pisanosaurus) have been found there, along with more representatives of that curious third contender, the herrerasaurs, with their intermediate anatomy that hints at the variety of the initial dinosaur radiation.4 But the Ischigualasto Formation is particularly useful in that sectors of it extend back into the Middle Triassic, where our familiar therapsid stars show up, like Probainognathus. It was from such earlier deposits that a new model of thecodont emerged in 1971. Named Lagosuchus by its discoverer (Alfred Romer!) it had a body far more similar to the early saurischian dinosaurs than Saltoposuchus. So Gish was derisively wagging his finger at the wrong animal, decades after paleontologists like Romer had already discovered a more exact intermediate, Lagosuchus. By 1995 dinosaur cladists had moved on to look for links between Lagosuchus and the likes of Eoraptor and the herrerasaurs. But as these forms were already so similar to one another, by then the game had become one of nodal hair-splitting.5 Troubles in Paradise-Downard 196 That Gish could be so out of sync with the material was a clue to the depth of the (non-Flood) waters into which he so confidently waded. In a 1993 appearance on D. James Kennedy’s periodic “Creation Week” antievolutionary broadcasts, Gish recounted how dinosaurs were a special interest of his. He stressed how he had pored through a dinosaur encyclopedia (unspecified) and visited the British Museum of Natural History whenever he was in London, all in that dedicated quest for the elusive dinosaur intermediates. Certainly the conclusions he reached could not be accounted for by any lack of enthusiasm.6 Yet the survey in Evolution: The Fossils STILL Say NO! was remarkably lean on references. Apart from a short section on polar dinosaurs (discovered by and not even remotely unsettling to established paleontologists) the only dinosaur information Gish provided citations for concerned the horned dinosaurs. The comparative wealth of detail there may have been occasioned by the fact that they were the single dinosaur example Arthur Strahler chose to criticize Gish on, thus lending further credence to the theory that creationists depend on evolutionists to stake out the field of inquiry for them.7 When it came to the horned dinosaurs, like Joshua fitting the battle of Jericho, Gish couldn’t keep horns off his mind: The unique feature of horned dinosaurs (suborder Ceratopsia) was, of course, the horns, from one to several in number.